Winthrop Means of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences has been on the
University faculty since 1965, 20 years as a full professor, and in that time served two
years as chair of the Department of Geological Sciences. In this 37-year career at
Albany, he has also developed innovative research techniques and methods that have
forever altered how scientists study the deformation of the Earth's crust and the
complex processes used in that investigation.

Presented in 1996 with the Career Achievement Award from the Structure and Tectonics
Division of the Geological Society of America, Means' research has been funded
continuously by the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 1976, enabling him to
pioneer the development of a new method for observing through a microscope, in real
time, the grain-scale deformation process. This discovery opened up an area of study
previously limited only to the examination of the initial and final stages of
experimentation. Through his work, the deformation process can now be repeated and its
results graphically demonstrated.

Means has also published consistently in the premier journals in the his field since
1962, with more than 50 authorships to his credit, and served on the editorial board of
two of those prestigious publications, The Journal of Structural Geology and
Tectonophysics. He has also served four years on NSF advisory committees and on the
boards of international geological associations, and was a 1992 Fulbright fellow. In
addition, he has published two influential textbooks, Stress and Strain: Basic Concepts
of Continuum Mechanics for Geologists and An Outline of Structural Geology, and co-
authored two others.

The new earth sciences building of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. now
includes an exhibit on Means' work, a tribute to the importance of his disciplinary
contribution. Part of the exhibit included his work with a graduate student, Youngdo
Park, only one of the next generation of science's most promising structural geologists
trained and inspired by Means.